COL Gian Gentile Twofer
Listen to General Dempsey by Gian Gentile at The American Conservative.
Johns Hopkins University Professor Eliot Cohen recently penned a Washington Post op-ed decrying U.S. Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He charges the general with breaching “proper civil-military relations” and tacitly violating our Constitution by publicly expressing misgivings about the likelihood of solving our problems with Syria by meddling in the nation’s civil war.
But the professor is wrong about Dempsey’s unique role in this debate and owes the general an apology…
The Army's Learning-and-Adapting Dogma by Gian Gentile, The National Interest.
The idea of “learning and adapting” in war, and in particular how well or poorly this has happened with counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, has consumed the American military and especially the U.S. Army.
However, this hyper-focus on learning and adapting has prevented the military from stepping back and objectively assessing the overall strategic and political worth of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan…
Much hard truth in both pieces.
Worth noting is that the second article calling out officials for failing to recognize the strategic failures in the face of “adaptive and learning” COIN tactics and operations, is a parallel situation in regards to CT.
In conventional warfare the sum of even bad tactics and operational design can ultimately add up to strategic success (e.g., WWI & WWII); but in populace-based conflicts (typically not really “war” at all as they are internal to a single system rather than between distinct systems) this is simply not the case. Governance must actually evolve to either engage the whole of society, or to release the rejected population from their control. In war one need “only” to force the other system to submit.
Efforts to help some foreign government created or adopted by us to secure our interests to suppress their own people to that end was obsolete over 100 years ago. Time to adopt a new strategy.